


and you breathe (one breath at a time)

by starlight_sugar



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 11:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14079441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: Lovelace goes somewhere warm, and quiet, where nobody has any idea who she is. Nobody, except for somebody who died in space six years ago.





	and you breathe (one breath at a time)

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** This is a work by fans for fans, not affiliated at all with Kinda Evil Genius Productions.
> 
>  **Content warnings:** This fic contains references to multiple canonical character deaths and deals heavily with those deaths and themes of loss.
> 
> With all my love to Tam, as always, who got me to listen to the show and who helped develop a lot of the ideas in this fic. Title is a line from [Miracle Mile,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq3mLvnBcTo%0A) by Cold War Kids.

Sydney is bright in the summer, a constant barrage of sunlight that slams into Isabel full-force the second she steps out of the airport. It was raining when she left Shanghai. Or maybe she’s still not used to sunlight - not blue light or red light or artificial Hephaestus lighting. Honest-to-god sunlight.

Isabel slips a voice recorder out of her pocket and switches it on. “Note to self,” she murmurs, “double-check which vitamins sunlight is supposed to give you. Just in case that matters.” She doesn’t need to record captain’s logs anymore, hasn’t for a long time, but it’s the fastest way to keep track of things. Grocery lists and memories from the old crew and whatever else is worth hanging onto these days.

She left her suitcase back in Brussels, so it’s easy to wander the streets with nothing but a backpack and a vague recollection of places she should visit. She’s never been to Australia before. She’d only left the country once, before the Hephaestus, and that was to go to Niagara Falls for the weekend with some friends in high school.

(Sam had laughed when she told him, and she’d raised her eyebrows, said “You telling me you traveled a lot, Oklahoma boy?” like it was a challenge. It always was a challenge, and maybe she’d feel bad about it if he’d ever stopped rising to the challenge. If he hadn’t met her every step of the way, until-)

There’s a list of names tucked away in her backpack. She’s been trying to visit people who deserve to know what happened. Kuan’s sisters, who grieved by screaming. Victoire’s mother, who’d cried as Isabel told her in halting French what happened to her daughter. Sam’s family, who barely reacted at all. Like they already knew he was dead.

They probably did know, she supposes. It’s not like it was hard to guess.

Sydney’s beautiful. She tries to imagine Mace in the city as she walks through it, slowly. He’s not from Sydney, of course, he’s from some smaller town. He used to talk about it, but she can’t remember the name of it, and of course his files with Goddard don’t exist anymore. There’s next to no proof that he was ever there.

But he was here. She imagines him squinting in the sunlight, trying to read a street sign. She imagines him pointing at some local business and saying that there, Captain, that’s his best friend’s uncle’s ice cream shop. She imagines him painted bright in the sun, laughing with his boyfriend, pushing a stroller.

Isabel blinks. That one felt less imaginary.

He’s gone by the time she looks back, of course. She’s been seeing ghosts for the last month. All of Kuan’s sisters had his smile. Every tall man with a suit and a carefully disarming smile is Cutter. Hell, she even sees shades of Minkowski and Eiffel sometimes, even though she knows both of them are safe and sound back stateside. She’s used to it by now. She should be used to it by now.

She still goes straight to her hotel room. Bolts the door once it’s closed. Moves a chair in front of the door just for good measure. Good things never happen when the dead start showing up again. She knows that better than anyone.

 

#

 

Getting back to Earth goes like this:

Goddard debriefs them. It takes weeks, plural, because nobody’s sure what to do with their story. Two of the most important people in the company are currently space debris, and the third doesn’t even remember her own name. And all the rest of them are officially dead.

It’s Jacobi, actually, who’s most helpful in moving things forward. Lovelace gets the impression that it’s because he wants to get out of there as fast as possible, but she has to admit, it’s nice having someone who knows people. Kepler’s name pulls weight, and by extension so does Jacobi’s. It gets things in motion, even with the gaps in the power structure.

The process is also kept completely secret from the public, which they probably weren’t supposed to figure out. Jacobi guesses as much on the second day, snorts and says “it’d look bad for them to be caught in a lie this big,” and that’s supposed to be that. It’s hard to bring people back to life, in terms of paperwork. Probably a nightmare.

But they’re debriefed. They see doctors, who don’t know what to do with Lovelace, human and also decidedly not. They see therapists, who kind of wave Lovelace off because there’s absolutely nothing in their repertoire that could help them deal with aliens. They sit in corporate meeting after corporate meeting where Lovelace tries to focus on getting out and not how badly she wants to rip this company to shreds.

Goddard lets them go on a Tuesday morning. They reach Minkowski’s husband that night, living just outside of Boston, and all of them pile into a house that seems far too empty for one man. Lovelace gets a bedroom to herself. They figure out how to install Hera in the house, because Doug refuses to let her live in a box. She’s up and running by Wednesday morning.

Jacobi’s gone by Wednesday afternoon without so much as a goodbye. It stings, maybe more than it should, but Lovelace has faith that he’ll come back one day. If only because he’s bored.

By the early hours on Thursday she has a list of cities. Shawnee, Brussels, Shanghai, Sydney. She writes and crosses out Moscow a dozen times - even if Selberg was hers he also decidedly wasn’t, and she doesn’t owe that man any more of her sympathy - and does the same for New York City. Who says you can’t go home? Probably other people whose entire families think they died in space years ago.

She makes a second list for good measure. Victoire used to wax rhapsodic about the summer she spent in Iceland, and Kuan had endless stories about visiting cousins in Hawaii. Sam traveled constantly, which she wouldn’t expect from someone from Oklahoma, but he wanted to see the world. Or, no, he felt like it’d be a shame if he didn’t. A shame? An embarrassment? It’s hard to remember his exact words.

It’s hard to remember his exact voice.

Lovelace lifts her voice recorder, brand new, purchased from a RadioShack with a shiny Goddard-issued credit card. “Get back in touch with Canaveral, see if they have any of Lambert’s old logs somewhere. Shake them down if you have to.”

Isabel Lovelace has a valid passport Thursday night. She says her goodbyes on Friday morning, promises to call and hugs Eiffel a little tighter than she should and leaves. She has more ghosts than the rest of them. It’s time to put them to rest.

 

#

 

The problem, which she learns in Oklahoma, is that as much as she wants to get this over with, she can’t start with the families. She tells Sam’s mother what happened one day, his father the next, and then if she stays in Oklahoma for one more goddamn second she thinks she’s going to suffocate, so she’s in Brussels the day after that.

(“That could just be an effect of Oklahoma,” Minkowski - no, Renee says, when Isabel calls her, now in Brussels and still not quite breathing right. “I mean, I’ve never really been there, but it sounds… like Oklahoma.”

“Maybe,” Isabel allows. “But if I’m going to be here, I should start with the tourist thing, right? Instead of just jumping in with the… bad news.”

“The tourist thing,” Renee echoes, in that voice that means she’s not laughing at Isabel, per se, but she’s definitely laughing and it just so happens that Isabel said something funny. “You mean relaxing?”

“I guess I do.”

“You’ve earned it.”

She has. She’s earned it and re-earned it and the universe probably owes her a full year of not dealing with other people’s problems at this point. “Then maybe I’ll stay in Belgium for a while.”

“Just make sure you call,” Renee says, soft and careful. She never says goodbye, only asks for Isabel to call again. And she always does.)

It takes two weeks in Brussels before she has the stomach to find Victoire’s family. After that she stops over in Moscow for all of two days, just to see the sights, and then it’s three weeks in Shanghai. And of course, by the end of that she’s ready to snap in half, so she takes a week for herself in Thailand to recover.

Sydney is warm, not as warm as Thailand but also sunnier. It’s not quiet, but it’s just her and her ghosts there. And it’s going to take a little more work to track down Fisher’s boyfriend - she knows his name’s Corey, he’s a history teacher, and he lives somewhere reasonably close to Sydney - so she might as well take another break.

She ends up on a beach, one of the quieter ones. It’s a weekday morning so it’s not terribly crowded, just a few families that Isabel makes a point of staying away from, carving out her own quiet corner in the sand. She sets up with a towel and an umbrella and a stack of books that she got from airports and-

-and her phone starts ringing.

Isabel sighs. It’d be easy, it’d be so easy to just ignore it, but the fact is not a lot of people call her. This number isn’t in enough databases to get calls, and it would be… inconsiderate if she didn’t take full advantage of Goddard generously footing all her bills for a little while. Including the bill for international calls.

She smoothly reaches into her backpack, resting a carefully-calculated arm’s length away from her on the sand, and swipes to answer. “You’ve reached the phone of Isabel Lovelace. I’m currently unavailable because I finally got to a real beach where I can relax for a while, so leave a message if-”

“Oh, I’m sorry, is this a bad time?” Hera asks, not sounding sorry at all.

Isabel rests back on her towel. “No, Hera, it’s not. Unless there’s an emergency, because I am halfway around the world right now and can’t help.”

“No emergencies. Thank god.”

She smiles, relaxing a little as she does. “And you’re bored?”

“Horribly.”

“What do you do now that nothing’s constantly going wrong?”

“Not much,” Hera admits. “I’ve been teaching myself new languages.”

“Programming language or human language?”

“A bit of both?”

“Of course,” Isabel says. She thinks idly that maybe she would’ve been sarcastic about that, once upon a time, but now it comes out fond. Indulgent. Hera complained about being in a house and how it was so much smaller than the Hephaestus, but now she has the Internet. There’s only so much complaining she can do with the entirety of human knowledge at her fingertips. “How’s everyone?”

Hera hums. “Minko- uh, Renee- _shoot._ Is it weird that I’m still having trouble with that?”

“It’s only been two months, Hera.”

“But I talk to her every day.”

“And how many days did you call her Minkowski?”

“More than sixty,” Hera admits. “Okay. Uh, Renee’s looking for jobs, although nobody’s really sure what kind of thing she should look for. Doug’s a waiter now, all the customers love him.”

“And everyone’s in one piece?”

“In one piece.” She says it so proudly that Isabel can’t help but smile. “And Renee’s been helping me practice my French.”

“Do you need to practice?”

“Of course I need to practice, just because I know the whole language doesn’t mean I know how to speak it right.”

“One of these days, you should learn a made-up language. Or make your own.”

“I’ve already looked into making up my own, but it’s not as easy as you might think. It’s kind of a fun side project, it’d be nice to talk to a linguist or something sometime. Figure out how-”

“Lovelace?” says someone, about three feet to her right.

She drops her phone. She hadn’t noticed anyone coming towards her, and these days there’s no way to tell if it’s someone hostile or not. From the other end of the phone Hera says something but Isabel’s hand is already halfway into her bag, where she has a knife waiting for her, and she looks up to see who it is and squints against the sunlight and-

“Lovelace,” says Mace Fisher, like he thinks she’s going to disappear.

Slowly, Isabel pulls her hand away from her backpack and lifts her sunglasses, just as Fisher - it can’t be, it has to be - drops to a crouch, then his knees. His hair’s longer now, curling in loose spirals around his cheeks. He has the same scar down one side of his nose. He’s wearing the most horrific swim trunks that she’s seen in her entire life, and he’s staring, and he’s here.

“Fisher,” she says, and he gulps, and suddenly her eyes are stinging. He sits back on his heels, looking winded, and Isabel remembers her phone. She snatches it up and takes a deep breath. “Hera.”

“Ca- Isabel, what’s going on, is everything okay?”

Is everything okay. Of course, everything’s fine. Just Lovelace and her ghosts again. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

“That’s not a yes.”

“I don’t know yet, Hera.” She’s still watching him, of course she is. He looks somewhere off over Isabel’s shoulder, mouths something that she doesn’t bother to try and understand. He must not be here alone. “It’s… complicated.”

“Are you safe?”

“I think so.”

“Call us back,” Hera says, voice small. “Just- just to be on the safe side.”

“Of course,” Isabel says, and hangs up. Fisher is still there, so that’s a good sign, probably. If this isn’t real then at least her brain is collapsing all at once. Hell, they have no idea what the sun’s radiation is going to do to her weird alien brain. Maybe long-term exposure induces hallucinations. Maybe this is the last thing she sees before her internal organs turn to soup. It could be worse, she figures.

Fisher’s still staring at her.

“So,” she says carefully. “This… is new.”

“You died in space,” Fisher says. “I don’t know if you heard.”

“No, I’ve been told.” She looks him up and down. She listened to him die, during that meteor storm. They all did. “You… also died in space.”

He snorts. “Apparently not.”

They never found a body. Of course they didn’t, it was deep space, but they never had anything to remember him by, other than what he left behind. “Apparently not,” she agrees, and her voice is a little thicker than she expected. “How about that?”

Fisher swallows. “The others-”

Isabel’s breath catches. None of the others had been home, when she visited. “They- Mace-”

“Oh,” Fisher breathes, and lunges forward. Isabel lets him, reaches out, pulls him in. And he feels real, not like a hallucination, not a ghost. He’s as real as she is and he’s squeezing her like he’s trying to make sure of it, one hand pressing her head into the crook of his shoulder. “Captain-”

“Oh, god, don’t call me captain,” she laughs, and he huffs out something like a sob, warm against the back of her neck. “I’m nobody’s captain anymore, got it?”

“Aye-aye,” Fisher says, and fans one of his hands out on her back. Isabel laughs again and her eyes are still stinging but she’s not crying, she can’t cry until she understands. “What are you doing here, anyways?”

Isabel sits back on her heels, keeping one hand pressed against Fisher’s shoulder. Just in case he disappears. He pulls away too, a little reluctantly, but one of his hands drops to her knee. “I was, uh. Trying to say goodbyes, you could call it.”

“Ah,” Fisher says. “I take it you haven’t been back long, then.”

“A couple months.” She shrugs. “Goddard… wasn’t interested in letting us go.”

Fisher raises his eyebrows. “Us.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I can imagine.”

“What about you?” Isabel rubs a hand across her eyes, probably scrubbing salt and sand into them, which has to be why the stinging doesn’t go away. “What… how long have you been back?”

Fisher shrugs. “Five years, give or take.”

“So you got back after the first mission.”

“First mission,” Fisher repeats, something like dread creeping into his voice. “Captain-”

“Isabel.”

“If you’re Isabel then I’m Mace.”

Isabel nods and takes a deep breath. “It’s… a _really_ long story. It’s one I can tell you, but-”

“Daddy!” a child’s voice shouts, from somewhere behind Isabel. Mace is on his feet in a flash, so fast that she barely has time to mourn the loss of contact before he’s off and running. It’s just enough to make her panic, so she whips around, climbing to her feet in the process. Her sunglasses tilt dangerously to one side, threatening to fall off, and she manages to settle them back on her face just as she spots Mace again.

He’s crouching low, looking seriously between two kids. Twins, if Isabel had to guess, both of them dark-haired and olive-skinned. They don’t look anything like Mace, but one of them has the same stubborn mouth, and one has the same honest eyes. His kids, if ever she’s seen them.

Cautiously, she takes a couple of steps closer. Mace doesn’t notice, talking in a low, serious voice to the twins. “Five minutes, alright? Five more minutes on the sand and then we can go back in the water, how does that sound?”

“But Kuan said he’s gonna squish my sand castle,” says the one with Mace’s mouth, and Isabel nearly takes a step back. “And I don’t want him to!”

Mace looks seriously at the twin with his eyes. “Kuan.”

“I’m not gonna squish it,” Kuan mutters. “But Sam said his was better than mine, and that’s not _nice._ ”

Mace turns back to the other twin, looking exasperated. “Sam-”

“Mine’s better,” Sam protests, but he falters instantly and turns to his brother. “I’m sorry, Kuan. You’re right, it wasn’t nice.”

“I’m sorry I said I was gonna squish yours,” Kuan says seriously. “That wasn’t nice either.”

“Good job, boys,” Mace says, and both of the twins brighten up instantly. It figures that Mace would have the most well-adjusted kids Isabel has ever seen. “Daddy just needs three more minutes to talk to his friend, and-”

“Friend?” Sam demands, and both twins turn to her immediately, with that uncanny perceptive stare that children always have.

Isabel’s hands are shaking. She notices it sort of absently, the same way she notices there’s a man with a sleeping baby lying on his chest watching them intently, the same way she notices that the only clouds in the sky are wispy and light and dreamlike. Like it doesn’t affect her that she’s having trouble breathing.

She glances at Mace, over the tops of her sunglasses, and he nods slightly, so she takes a couple steps forward and drops into a crouch next to him. “Hi, guys.”

“You’re friends with Daddy?” asks Kuan.

Isabel nods. “I am. I used to work with him, a long time ago.”

“In space?”

“Yes, in space.”

“Whoa,” Kuan whispers. “Was he cool?”

“The coolest.”

Mace snorts and nudges her with his shoulder, still as solid and real as anything. “Second after you, maybe.”

“Oh, definitely,” Isabel says, with an exaggerated nod, and both of the twins giggle. “But, you know, it’s hard to measure up to me.”

“Daddy’s cool!” Sam bounces up and down. “This one time, this one time he was making pancakes, and he flipped them in the air!”

“In the air?” Isabel repeats, trying to sound like it’s the coolest thing she’s ever heard. “You know, that might just be cooler than me.”

“Never, Captain,” Mace mumbles, and Isabel rolls her eyes. Maybe she shouldn’t teach kids to roll their eyes, but if they’re living with Mace, they’re probably going to be supernaturally patient. Someone has to teach them. “Boys, we can go in the water as soon as I’m done talking to Miss Isabel, alright?”

“Miss Isabel?” Kuan turns so he’s looking at her and leans in, putting his face very, very close to hers. It takes all her self control not to pull back. Children can smell fear, or something. “Like baby Izzy?”

“Baby Izzy,” Isabel repeats. “Is that… a TV show, or something?”

Kuan giggles. “No, silly, it’s our sister!”

“Sister,” Isabel echoes, feeling like a broken record. They have a sister named Isabel. That can’t be right. She turns, carefully, to look at Mace, who is staring intently at the sand by her feet. “Mace.”

“Middle name’s Victoire,” he mumbles, and meets her eyes, looking sheepish. “There’s not a lot else you can do to remember people, these days.”

She understands. When the world has already mourned and moved on, when Isabel’s mission to say her goodbyes was met only with acceptance and grief that’s still heavy on her skin, there’s not much else to do, other than remembering. He had to grieve already, without her.

 _“Mace,”_ she says again, her throat so thick that it hurts to say. She swallows a couple times, until she feels like she can breathe again, and says, “We can talk later.”

“Yeah?” Mace says, and she wonders if he expected her to want to talk to him. He looks so… hopeful.

“Yeah.” She takes a deep breath. “I can… you know, I brought books. I have a cell phone that I mostly understand how to use. I can kill time.”

Mace laughs. “Yeah, those have changed a lot. You want to come in the water with us?”

Isabel has gone swimming once, in the last two months. It was in a Goddard facility, for some kind of fitness check-up. It’d been nice at first, cool and refreshing. Chlorine is one of those things that she’d forgotten, not unlike the exact flavor of potato chips and how to talk to children, and she’d even appreciated the sting in her eyes.

It’d taken eight minutes and forty-one seconds, as per her official Goddard chart, before the panic set in. Before the water stopped feeling like water, and all she knew was that she was floating, and if she was floating she must’ve been back in space, back on the Hephaestus, and if she was on the station then she wasn’t safe, and-

Nine minutes. A new record, said the Goddard tech who was observing her. Most former astronauts don’t even make it to five.

“Maybe later,” Isabel says. As long as her feet are on the ground, she should be fine.

“She can sit with me,” someone says, off to one side. It’s the man with the sleeping baby, still watching them. He has one hand resting on the baby’s back, and he looks relaxed, but his eyes are as sharp as anything she’s ever seen. “If you want.”

Isabel nods slowly. “I think I’d like that.”

Mace reaches out and brushes some sand off one of Isabel’s knees, leaving his hand to rest on her thigh. “Alright.”

“Alright,” Isabel repeats, and looks back at the twins. “Sam. Kuan.” She has to take a deep breath, because fuck, even that is hard to say, isn’t it? How does Mace do it every day? “It was very nice meeting you.”

“You too,” Kuan says, very seriously. Just like any kid trying to pretend to be a grown-up. It reminds her of Hui, of her Kuan.

“Are you gonna still be Daddy’s friend?” Sam asks. “Because you look like a good friend.”

A good friend. A good captain who lost her crew and barely scraped out with her second crew. A good person trying to say her goodbyes.

“I will be his friend,” she says. It’s too awkward and stilted for a kid but it’s all she can manage. Friends are hard to come by these days.

Mace squeezes her leg and gets to his feet. “Who’s ready to go in the ocean!”

The twins both scream in excitement, and Isabel glances back at the man who is most certainly Corey. “You mind if I bring my things over?”

“Course not,” Corey says, amiable as anything. “Although I hope you don’t mind that I’m going to be asking you a few questions.”

Isabel smiles faintly. None of them talked about Their People Back Home too often, at least not in the first few hundred days, but she still remembers Mace talking about his boyfriend. He used to say Corey was smart. And suspicious. She can see that already.

As soon as she settles in next to him, Corey points out towards the water. “I had to come to Sydney for a work conference. It was Mace’s idea to make a trip out of it and bring the kids, and he’s been wrangling all three of them by himself for most of the week.”

Isabel follows where he’s pointing. Mace is in the shallows of the ocean, each twin holding his hand. Every time a wave comes in, no matter how small, they all try to jump over it. She can hear the twins shrieking and laughing, and Mace laughing with them. “How old are they?”

“They turned four last month.” Corey smiles faintly. “He was self-conscious about the name thing. Originally it was going to be Samuel Kuan, and then we found out we’d be adopting twins.”

“And you were okay with it?”

“Of course. My boyfriend comes back from space, from the actual dead, and says he wants to name the kids after the people he lost? What kind of a person would say no?”

Isabel nods, and looks at the baby still asleep on Corey’s chest. “She’s quiet.”

Corey snorts and strokes the baby’s - Izzy’s back, smiling down at her. “Tired herself out screaming earlier.”

“I hear that babies do that.”

“You have no idea.”

“How did he come back?”

“We’re still not sure,” Corey admits, and looks back out towards Mace and the twins. “He says the last thing he remembers is getting knocked off the station by a meteor, and then next thing he knows he’s back on the station two years later with nobody but that doctor of yours there.”

Something cold creeps up Isabel’s spine. “And what did the good doctor do?”

“Lied to everyone who came to rescue them.”

“Lied?”

“Said that there was some kind of misunderstanding, that Mace had been with them the whole time in a coma.” Corey shakes his head. “They made it back to Earth and Selburg disappeared. Mace looks for him sometimes.”

“That’s good of him,” Isabel says, because it is. Even if Hilbert doesn’t deserve a damn good thing anymore. Even if he infected Mace with Decima for the sake of research, for some greater good that turned out to be no good at all. Maybe it was his penance, bringing Mace back to Earth. After all, he knew the theta scenario. He probably knew there was no point in running experiments on an alien.

“You don’t sound like you mean it.” Corey looks at her, eyes narrowing. “Do you know how he came back?”

Isabel exhales. “I do.”

Corey takes a deep breath. “I’m not going to ask you to explain, but Mace will.”

“I know.”

“And be careful, when you do. Whatever it is, he already has questions.”

“What kind of questions?

“Doctors have been saying he’s in peak condition for the last five years. They also keep saying that he breaks some of their equipment.”

Psi waves, Isabel thinks. Psi waves, or alien biology, or one of those other things that Pryce and Cutter went on and on about.

Because he’s like her.

“I’ll be careful,” she says, and turns away from Corey’s eyes, back towards the shoreline. One of the twins jumps too high and crashes to his knees in the water. Mace lets go of his hand, just long enough to scoop him up and balance him on his hip. “I’ll tell him the truth, if he asks, but I’m not going to scare him away or anything.”

“Good,” Corey says quietly. “And I know we’ve never met before, but I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Isabel quirks a smile. “Thanks. I’m glad he came back to you.”

“Me too,” Corey murmurs. Mace picks up the other twin now, holding them both carefully, like it’s nothing. Like he was made to hold them. “Me too.”

 

#

 

Mace and Corey have to leave first, because when you have three kids you need to feed them lunch. They leave Isabel with Mace’s phone number, Corey’s number in case Mace’s phone dies, and a small collection of seashells that Kuan picked out for her.

(“I didn’t get her anything,” Sam whispers, looking absolutely horrified, and then proceeds to dump a child-size fistful of sand on each of Isabel’s thighs. “Is mud good for your skin?”

Mace, who’s reapplying sunscreen on Kuan, takes one look at Isabel’s face and laughs so hard that he has to sit down.)

And then they’re gone, and it’s Isabel, by herself on a beach. Just like she wanted.

The breeze keeps blowing. The air still tastes like salt. The waves keep crashing on the sand. There are still families around, but a few have filtered out, probably to go to lunch or school or whatever else families in Sydney have to do. Maybe they’re on vacation. Maybe they’re just passing through. Maybe she’s just passing through, although she’s not sure where exactly she’ll go after this. She still has that list: Reykjavik for Victoire, Honolulu for Kuan, Sao Paulo and Quebec and Copenhagen and San Francisco for Sam. Disneyland. New York. Boston.

She doesn’t remember getting to her feet, but the next thing she knows she’s standing in the shallows. The water’s around her ankles, lapping against her calves, gritty with sand and salt. It feels good. It’s grounding.

She’s holding her cell phone. Slowly, she punches in the numbers and holds her breath.

Renee picks up on the second ring. “Hey! I was just about to call you, I got a package from Goddard today. Apparently they archived all of your crew’s old logs on analog recorders. Less of a chance of a hacker accidentally finding some of Goddard’s dirty laundry. Hera and Dom are going to try and convert them to digital for you, although you can always come pick them up in person.”

Isabel swallows. The world seems too bright, suddenly. She’s not used to the sunlight, she might never be used to the sunlight again, she spent seven years in deep space and she was dead for three of those. Or maybe she was only alive for two of them.

She remembers Lambert’s voice. Or maybe she just remembers a ghost of it. It’d be another thing, another thing entirely, to have his logs. Or to have him in front of her. The way Mace was.

“Isabel?” Renee says cautiously. “Are you there?”

“There’s a baby here named after me,” Isabel says abruptly. It seems like the easiest entry point.

Renee goes quiet. Isabel takes the opportunity to lower herself so she’s sitting in the water. She’d forgotten what sand felt like, but it’s the kind of muddy sand that’s easy to bury your toes in. She has one foot halfway covered in mud when Renee finally says, cautiously, “We’ve only been back for two months.”

“I know.”

“That’s not enough time for that to happen.”

“She was adopted.”

“Who adopted her?”

“Mace Fisher, from my old crew.”

Another silence. This one only lasts long enough for Isabel to get the toes of her other foot into the sand, before: “Is there some kind of an explanation for this?”

“I think it’s another theta scenario.” She pauses. “Actually, I’m sure of it, because the only other option is that I just vividly hallucinated a two-hour encounter with five people, only one of whom I’d ever met before.”

“Who were the other four?”

“His partner and kids.”

“You never met them?”

“Never had the chance. Kids are all under the age of four anyways. For all I know-” Isabel swallows, hoping it wasn’t too obvious that her voice cracked. For all she knows it was just wishful thinking.

Renee sighs noisily. “Did you look them up on Facebook?”

“What?”

“Facebook. Finding a profile page to see if you were imagining them.”

Isabel blinks. “No.”

“Alrighty then,” Renee says briskly. It’s kind of a comfort: all business, no question of what it means if Isabel is seeing things, just another fact-finding mission. Isabel can hear her tap a few buttons, and then: “Hera, you busy?”

“No,” Hera says immediately. “No, I’m- Isabel! You hung up so fast earlier, was everything okay?”

“I ran into one of my old crew members,” Isabel says, as no-nonsense as she possibly can. Renee’s certainly not fooled, but Hera just might be, if she plays her cards right. “We’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”

“We’re looking for a Facebook page,” Renee explains. “Or some other kind of social media.”

“Ooooh, finally, something interesting!”

Isabel grins. She can’t see Renee, all the way in Massachusetts, but she can still imagine Renee grinning back at her. “I don’t have a lot for you to go on,” she warns. “His name is Mason Fisher, and his partner’s name is Corey.”

“Last name?”

“Don’t know.”

“Occupation?”

“Corey’s a history teacher, or at least he was seven years ago. Mace was in the military.”

“Anything else?”

“They have three kids, Sam, Kuan, and Izzy.”

“And they live in Australia?”

“Yes. Although I’m not sure where.”

Hera hums to herself. “You sure like to give a girl a challenge, I’ll tell you that. And my first Facebook search isn’t picking up anything.”

Isabel’s heart hiccups in her throat. “Nothing?”

“Not yet, but I started with all the parameters in place and I’m broadening the search as we go.”

“Try the other sites too,” Renee suggests. “Twitter, or Instagram, or whatever people are using these days.”

“I’m already running those too,” Hera says. Isabel knows that tone of voice. It’s the “I don’t want to tell you my systems are failing, but they are” voice. “I’m still not seeing anything. And I’m running Corey with an E-Y, Cory with just a Y, I’m putting K’s in there-”

“Have you tried LinkedIn?” a new voice says. “If they’re trying to fly under the radar, which they very well might be, they won’t be on Facebook, but most professionals are on there these days.”

“Oooh,” Renee says softly. “Good one, Dom.”

“Thank you. Hi, Isabel.”

“Hi, Dominik.”

“Are you still in Thailand?” Dominik asks, sounding completely unbothered by the fact that his wife’s best friend is searching for evidence of someone who might not exist. Isabel likes that about him. He takes everything in stride.

“Australia, actually.”

“Staying in the warm half of the world, I see.”

Isabel snorts. “Yeah, it’s great, it’s always sunny in Sydney.”

“Oh, god,” Renee mutters. “You know, it’s crazy to say this, but I’m still not used to the sun. Like, the actual sun, you know what I mean? Heat that isn’t from a vent, light that isn’t from a bulb…”

“Or a star outside the window,” Isabel adds. “And isn’t blue.”

“Isn’t blue!” Renee snaps her fingers. “I keep expecting everything to be blue!”

“And way colder.”

“God, way colder. And I keep forgetting about gravity.”

Isabel laughs, a little more wetly than she intends, but she can’t help it. “Earlier today I was lying on the beach, reading a book, and I went to put the book down-”

“Oh, no,” Renee laughs, like she’s already figured out the punchline to the joke. Or already lived it out a dozen times over.

“Except, of course, I just let go of it, and it fell-” Isabel smacks her knee with one hand. “Right into my solar plexus.”

Dom chuckles. “Hopefully it wasn’t too heavy.”

“Eh, just an airport paperback. Heaviest thing about it was the main character’s tragic backstory.” She sighs. “Worst part was that I cursed loudly on a public beach and almost woke up a sleeping baby, but-”

“Check your phone,” Hera says suddenly. “Is this him?”

Isabel pulls her phone away from her ear and looks at it. The message from Hera opens on its own, as messages from Hera are wont to do. It’s a professional headshot, much cleaner and more put-together than he’d been on the beach.

“Yeah,” Isabel says, a little winded. “That’s Corey.”

“Awesome,” Hera says, clearly relieved. “Corey Rapp, that’s C-O-R-E-Y, has a LinkedIn profile, thank you, Dominik. He’s still a history teacher at a secondary school north of Sydney. Government records show he adopted twins about four years ago and a daughter last year, like you said. No evidence of a spouse or partner, at least not on the record, but knowing what Goddard’s like, that doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t look like Corey has a Facebook or anything under his own name.”

“Neither do I,” Renee points out. “If anything that makes them smart. Means they’re watching out.”

“Good choice,” Dominik murmurs. Isabel agrees, would say as much if she could remember how to breathe.

Mace is here. He’s alive, more than six years after he died, and he’s also definitely an alien. She’s going to have to tell him. Maybe Corey, too, depending on how Mace takes it. She’s not the only one in the world, and somehow, that’s worse than if she were alone. At least if it were just her she wouldn’t have anything to feel guilty about.

“Lovelace,” Renee says quietly.

Isabel blinks. Her skin is hot. Right. Sunlight. Beach. She’s here. “Hey.”

“You okay?”

“I’m good.”

“Hera and Dom left,” Renee says cautiously. “You kinda went dark for a minute there. Anything you wanna talk about?”

“Not really.”

“How about things you don’t want to talk about?”

“Oh, there are way more of those, don’t worry.”

“I’d be more worried if there weren’t,” Renee admits. “So. You found your alien crewmate who survived the most unlikely series of events that any human has experienced.”

“You really think that’s more unlikely than what we went through?”

“Eh.” Isabel can picture the accompanying shrug, almost jokingly nonchalant. “It’s gotta be on the list, right? Anything involving aliens is… up there.”

“Oh, up there,” Isabel mutters, and Renee makes a soft noise that somehow sounds like a smile. “How’s Doug?”

“Definitely the most well-adjusted out of all of us.”

“Hera said he got a job?”

“He works the night shift at Olive Garden. Customers love him.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” Renee says, and then goes quiet, and Isabel feels… bad, for a few seconds. She’d been with Renee and Doug for a while, but what they’d had, the casual trust and the years of determination to survive, was irreplaceable. Doug-and-Renee is never going to be the same as Eiffel-and-Minkowski.

“How about you?” Isabel asks, and then kind of wants to kick herself. That’s not necessarily a better talking point.

Renee hums. “Better than I’ve been. Dom and I decided I can’t go back to the military, what with being legally dead, so I’ve been trying to put together the case against Goddard.”

“By yourself?”

“With Hera, sometimes.”

“So by yourself.”

“Mostly,” Renee admits. “I was going to wait for you to come back, but…”

But this trip was supposed to take two weeks, tops, and Isabel hasn’t come back yet. But she has a second list of places to visit. But now she found somewhere else that she could stay for a while. But you can’t plan on someone who might not come back, don’t you know that by now, Captain?

“I’ll help once I’m back,” Isabel says, which she figures is the most honest thing she can say. When she’s ready she’s going to burn Goddard to the ground. Which reminds her: “Have you heard anything from Jacobi?”

“Not yet.”

“And you haven’t tracked him down?”

“Isabel,” Renee chides. “He’s an adult, he’s not my responsibility, and if his way of handling it is leaving, then I’m not here to judge him for it.”

“So that’s a no,” Isabel says, and grins when Renee groans. “He’ll turn up sooner or later.”

“Yeah, I know. And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Fisher’s alive,” Renee says, like Isabel could have possibly forgotten. “You’re not the only theta scenario. You’re in another new country by yourself. Take your pick. I have a couple reasons to be worried here.”

And Isabel thinks about it, actually thinks about it. It’d be easy to lie, sure, but Renee would know, and she figures if they’re in this whole space trauma business together she might as well be honest.

She pulls one of her feet out of the sand, sticking it into the water. “I'm coping,” she says slowly. “It’s early yet in the process. I think I might be going through the opposite of the five stages of grief.”

“Is that going through the stages in backwards order or experiencing the opposite of each stage?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Thinking you were hallucinating could be a form of denial,” Renee says, far too thoughtful. “Or the opposite of acceptance? Is that how it works?”

“I don’t know, shrinks gave up on me, remember?” Isabel’s phone buzzes in her hand, and she glances at the screen. “Mace is calling me.”

“Then answer!”

“Okay,” Isabel says, and then, “Thank you.”

Renee doesn’t ask what she’s thanking her for. She’s smart like that. “Any time. Time zones don’t matter, just call.”

“I will,” Isabel says. It’s not quite a lie. “Talk to you soon, Renee.”

“Talk to you soon, Isabel.”

Isabel swipes over to answer. “Mace.”

“Isabel,” Mace says brightly. She almost doesn’t catch the note of surprise. “I realized I forgot to ask how long you’re in Sydney.”

“Until I leave.”

“No dates?”

“Well, you know, international travel gets a lot easier when a multibillion dollar company is footing the bill.”

“Huh,” Mace says. “Well, if you’re not busy tonight-”

“Isabel,” Renee says, sounding far too amused, and Isabel almost jumps out of her skin in surprise. “You didn’t hang up on me.”

Isabel frowns. “Apparently not. Did I make it a conference call?”

“You’re still not used to the new phone,” Renee says smugly, which is completely unfair. Phones have changed a lot in seven years, and Isabel is entitled to a few moments of staggering confusion. “That’s okay, you know.”

“Took me a while to get used to it too,” Mace says, in what’s probably supposed to be a sympathy move. “Touch screens and all.”

“You must be Mace Fisher,” Renee says, and Isabel’s breath catches. It’s so outrageously _her,_ making a point of acknowledging that she can hear the person on the other end of the phone. “I’m Renee Minkowski. Former commander of the final mission to the USS Hephaestus Station, which is currently space dust.”

“Can’t say I’m sad to hear about that,” Mace admits. “And Captain, you owe me… so many explanations for all of that.”

“Many, many explanations,” Isabel agrees. “I can pay for drinks too.”

“I’ll leave you two to make plans now.” Renee pauses, and Isabel can feel the smugness from thousands of miles away. It’s strangely comforting. “Isabel, don’t worry, I can hang up on my own.”

“I’m so happy for you,” Isabel says as dryly as possible. “I’ll call you soon, Renee.”

“You’d better,” Renee says, and then there’s a soft beep.

Isabel exhales. “So. Drinks?”

“I probably shouldn’t leave my hotel, if Corey’s alone with the kids, but-”

“Hotel bar?”

“Hotel bar. I’ll send you the address.”

“Let me know when it’s a good time to come.”

“I will.” Mace pauses. “So, we can talk about this later, but…”

“But?”

“Renee, hm?”

Isabel groans. “Mace.”

“Are you guys close?”

“Come on.”

“No, I’m just saying, you sounded happy to talk to her.”

“That’s because I was.”

“Good,” Mace says, sounding pleased. “I have to run now, I just wanted to call and check.”

“Yeah,” she says softly. “I’ll see you tonight, Mace.”

“I’ll see you tonight,” he echoes, and then there’s that soft beep again, and Isabel’s alone on the beach.

One of her feet is still buried in the sand. Carefully, she wiggles her toes. The mud squishes between them. It almost tickles, and she can feel some of the sand dissolving in the water. The shallows are still lapping around her, against her hips, her thighs, one hand that she plants in the sand while she cradles her phone in the other.

There was a point where she thought she’d never make it back to a beach. She hadn’t been to many beaches before space, and definitely not many with actual oceans. The Air Force isn’t exactly interested in destination resorts, after all. But here she is. Sitting on a beach in Sydney.

Isabel swirls her hand through the water, letting the sand cloud around her. She never thought she would feel sand again. Or sun. Or the sheer gratitude of knowing that someone else made it out alive. She has another list, one that’s been getting longer: things she’s getting to experience again. Maybe for the first time, depending how you look at it.

Sydney is bright in the summer. There are people waiting for her in Boston, and a list of cities she has to visit. There’s a stack of books on the beach, next to her backpack, underneath an umbrella. She should go back to those and make some kind of progress, or at the very least make sure nobody takes her book before she can finish it.

She stays in the ocean, just a little longer. It’s not every day that she gets the chance.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on both [Tumblr](http://waveridden.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](http://twitter.com/waveridden) \- come say hi! This fic also has a [Pinterest board,](https://www.pinterest.com/waveridden/au-come-up-for-air/) if that's your jam.


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